Croquet's Not All Fun

Some of it is quite hard work!  On Monday we started to de-thatched one of the lawns.  The problem is that the grass builds up into a thatch on top of the soil and we now have over a centimetre of thatch which causes all sorts of problems. 

Usually only flat-soled sports shoes are allowed on the lawns and here we have a 2 tonne vehicle and trailer!

The machine cutting grooves into the lawn and tearing out thatch

How many people does it take to look at a technical hitch?  Actually when the de-thatcher wasn't working no one else had a job.

It makes you wonder if they will ever be played on again!  The result with about 8% of the thatch torn out

The result!  All this has been tamped down hard to get it into the trailer.  Now all this will have to be replaced with soil.

An Afternoon Lying on the Grass

This afternoon a number of us Croqueteers spent the afternoon resetting the hoops on the croquet lawns.  This involves lots of measuring and then drilling new holes for the hoops in their new positions.  Then the old holes have to be reamed out and turf plugs inserted.  There are 36 hoops so that's a minimum of 72 holes with another 7 for the pegs and some to repair 'rabbit runs' (the indentations in the lawn in a hoop caused by balls continually passing through the hoops).  All in all it's a lot of work.  One of my jobs for the afternoon was ensuring that the hoops were aligned correctly and hammered in vertically.  This involved lying on my stomach for several hours.  Which, I have to say, was a lot more tiring for the neck than I might have imagined had I not done it before.  In fact, despite the apparent easiness of the task I ended up doing it because no-one else wanted too.  At the end of a couple of hours I had had enough of 'doing nothing' too:

The Beloved Croquet Lawns

The Marewa Croquet Club in Napier to which I belong has six of the finest lawns in New Zealand: certainly as good as the best I have played on. That doesn't mean, however, that they are constantly flawless. At the moment we have an invasion of starweed. This is a plantain which lives in colonies making holes in the thatch of lawns. It probably arrived in topsoild used to dress the lawns each winter. As an aside many bowling greens are not grass but wholly starweed. We have been manually working on the lawns digging the weed out prior to the winter work on the lawns. It's not a pretty sight. As a general rule it affects me less than many players in the Club because I tend to hit the ball hard and it 'ignores' minor flaws in the lawn.